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Why China is giving away its tech for free

25 points| jcartw | 8 months ago |economist.com

32 comments

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chasil|8 months ago

This is in queue, will update with final URL if successful.

Edit: This just jumped from #7 in queue to #2380 in queue. I should have used another service.

https://archive.ph/wip/hOIIa

If/when it completes, it should be here:

https://archive.ph/hOIIa

onewheeltom|8 months ago

Looks like the Economist has discovered a way to prevent archive.ph from functioning.

hobo_mark|8 months ago

Didn't know there was a queue, how does it work? Readers upload the paywalled article? Does that mean uploaders can alter the version of the article we end up seeing?

jedberg|8 months ago

Commoditize the compliment at a massive scale? Make everything free and then only the raw natural resources become what makes a country valuable, instead of the output of their knowledge work.

oytis|8 months ago

But that's essentially the bright future drawn by American AI companies.

As on copyright vs no copyright, I agree with the view of Bunny Huang. Chinese laxity with copyright doesn't destroy the advantage of the first mover - it just puts a limit to it. Basically if you want to be on top, you need to keep innovating non-stop, you can't rest on your laurels.

Systems relying on copyright allow companies to alienate engineers' work, that's how Oracle ended up with more lawyers than engineers (even if that's just a meme). Systems where knowledge is distributed freely (including the open source community) gives power to engineers.

scotty79|8 months ago

Shouldn't we rather ask why the West is incessantly copyrighting everything?

How many rent seekers and leeching lawyers and advertisers our economy and consumers can suffer?

What's wrong with us?

nobodyandproud|8 months ago

Term limits and age ceilings for Congressional reps would go a long way in solving this problem.

Atlas667|8 months ago

Copying takes negligible amounts of energy. It is only a matter of time. Copyright is doomed to fail.

seydor|8 months ago

... "but economist is not giving away its articles"?

oytis|8 months ago

From the snippet I can read looks like open source is a authoritarian thing

ksec|8 months ago

It is about destroying the industry which the West have a stronghold in. Giving it away for free, in the name of Open source also attract a lot of "common interest", those from Europe who want to break free of US, and those from US who wants US to fail, and companies who simply want another company to fail so they could gain competitive advantage. And China is very happy to help.

It has been blatantly obvious for the past 10 plus years yet most still see it as if it is new.

cherryteastain|8 months ago

And this is bad for everyone except US gigacorporations how?

seydor|8 months ago

What "stronghold"? The science of LLMs is widely known, with everyone adding new small tricks everywhere. The main moat so far has been the availability of compute, and that's a leaky moat because inevitably more companies will find enough compute or make snappier models, or simply take more time to train them.

There is no secret sauce or moat , they ve been saying that for years, and it's still true. Being number 2 in the race is a losing position, so china probably thought they might as well give it away

oytis|8 months ago

What about those who want specifically AI oligopolies to fail?

Atlas667|8 months ago

Think: How did they target all of those Iranian scientists?

Most likely through their phones. They can just track you if they wanted to. Everybody knows it. This sentiment is part of why the USA will lose the propaganda war.

There is no amount of propaganda the USA can make to remedy this reality.

aitchnyu|8 months ago

Can you share examples from the past 10 years?